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Tuesday, June 2, 2015

Weekend in Havana (20th Century-Fox, 1941)

The film was Week-End in Havana (that antique spelling of “Week-End” as a hyphenated
word instead of the more common “Weekend” was on the original title credit and
also is how the film is listed on imdb.com), third in the sequence of 20th
Century-Fox color musicals made to assist President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good
Neighbor Policy” towards Latin America (inspired, as I’ve suggested earlier in
these pages, at least in part by the desire to get Latin American countries on
board with the Allied side in World War II so the Axis couldn’t get badly
needed war materiel and resources from them) and offer lush, gorgeous
depictions of our neighbors to the south. The first in the sequence, Down
Argentine Way, co-starred Betty Grable and
Don Ameche — Grable, who’d been kicking around Hollywood for over a decade,
became an “overnight” star with this film even though it’s not much of a
showcase for her (only in the final dance number does she get to show her
soon-to-be-famous legs) — while the second, That Night in Rio, co-starred Ameche (in a dual role) with Alice Faye,
who had been scheduled to make Down Argentine Way until she got an attack of appendicitis just before
shooting was supposed to begin. Weekend in Havana was the third in the sequence, and this time around
Faye was a last-minute replacement for Grable — while her co-star was John
Payne, who’d had a middling career mostly stuck in the “B”’s at Warners, then
got lured to Fox with the promise of co-starring in major musicals like this,
only when the wartime musical boom and his popularity dipped, Payne started
making independent films and tried to duplicate Dick Powell’s successful
transition from musical star to film noir actor.

The “series” nature of this production was emphasized by the
use of the same credit design as in the previous movies — the titles in yellow
on a red background printed as a diagonal ribbon across the screen — and also
the appearance of Carmen Miranda, whose over-the-top “Brazilian Bombshell” act
is (as usual) the best thing about this movie. Weekend in Havana was written by Karl Tunberg (his most famous credit
was the 1959 Ben-Hur, for which
he was the only credited writer
even though more highly regarded scribes like Christopher Fry, S. M. Behrman
and Gore Vidal had also been involved) and Darrell Ware, and directed by Walter
Lang — a slight improvement over Irving Cummings, who’d done the previous two —
and it has a marvelous score by Harry Warren and lyricist Mack Gordon,
including the title song (sung by Carmen Miranda in fractured English — though
not as fractured as I remembered
it; I had thought she sang “Would you like to spaind a weekaind in Havana?,”
but instead she says “spend” and “weekend” in the normal fashion) and the
lovely “Tropical Magic,” sung by Alice Faye in a nightclub (she picks up the
melody from a trio who do it in Spanish and magically knows the English lyric
already) and later reprised for a duet between her and John Payne as they’re
lying together in a cart carrying newly cut sugar cane to be refined. (It’s one
of those odd duets, like those records Neil Sedaka made with his daughter in
the 1970’s, in which the woman has a lower voice than the man.) Jimmy Dorsey
also made a record of “Tropical Magic,” with Bob Eberly as the vocalist, and
the song brought out the very best in both him and Alice Faye (the less said
about John Payne — whose voice wasn’t bad, just serviceable — the better).
According to American Movie Classics host Bob Dorian — Charles and I were
watching this off a DVD dub I’d just made from a 1988 showing on that late,
lamented network (it’s still in business but has been thoroughly Debbie-ized
and is now best known for “original” series like Mad Men and The Walking Dead) and I had included Dorian’s intro but had cut off
the beginning so I wasn’t clear which writer he said that had happened to, but when one of the writers was
on a cruise ship and the ship ran aground close to a coastline, he had the idea
to use that as the basic plot for Weekend in Havana.

So the action of this one — after a hot opening performance
of Carmen Miranda singing the title song — begins with a panicked meeting at
the McCracken Steamship Company between its owner, Walter McCracken (George
Barbier), and his assistant and ace fix-it man, Jay Williams (John Payne). It
seems that their liner Cuban Queen
has just run aground off the Florida coast, thereby blowing the vacation of
everyone who’d booked passage on it for a “weekend in Havana,” and Jay — whose
omnipresent reading glasses make him look vaguely like Harold Lloyd — is sent down
to get release forms from everyone so the steamship company isn’t going to get
sued. Only Macy’s shopgirl Nan Spencer (Alice Faye), who tells Jay (and us) she
saved for years to go on that vacation, including skipping lunch to buy the
spectacular clothes she wanted to travel in, is unwilling to sign until she’s
actually had her vacation and enjoyed it. So Jay has to squire her around
Havana himself, and when she proves unresponsive to his charms he hires professional gigolo and gambler
Monte Blanca (César Romero — and just why does this character have the name “white mountain”?) to romance her —
thereby pissing off Monte’s regular girlfriend, singer Rosita Rivas (Carmen
Miranda). The plot of this one is even more beside the point than usual — at
times Tunberg, Ware and Lang are able to make it passable and even genuinely
amusing French-style farce, but for the most part it plods leadenly and just
gets in the way of what we really
want to watch, including the singing (especially Miranda’s), the dancing and
the spectacular second-unit shots of the real Havana. Imdb.com reviewer
“bkoganbing” praised Fox for sending a second unit, with director James Curtis
Havens, to Havana and shooting new backgrounds for the film instead of just
using old newsreel footage, forgetting that since this film was in color and
colorization hadn’t been invented yet, they needed footage of Havana in
color and that probably did not exist in newsreels or stock-footage libraries. Just
why Weekend in Havana is
considered enough of a stepchild among Faye’s or Miranda’s movies that it’s not
available in the three boxed sets of Alice Faye and Carmen Miranda 20th
Century-Fox Home Video has thus far released even though they’re both in it is
a mystery, but it’s a nice, entertaining little movie, with great location
shots, glorious Technicolor (even though the whole image was so bathed in blue
Charles complained that in one scene Carmen Miranda looked like Krishna), great
songs and good (and, in Miranda’s case, great) singers to sing them.